Free Republic

THE SCENE: As the curtain rises, we see an empty podium, in front of the humble 60-room mansion that serves as the village hall of the remote, rural village of Chelm. Next to the podium, on the lawn, is a shiny new American-made electric car. It is mid-morning on a weekday, and the members of the local village council – the Wise Men of Chelm – have just completed their weekly board meeting. A few reporters walk on stage, taking their seats in front of the podiums, and finally, the Mayor of Chelm’s press secretary, Benito Bugiardo, walks on stage,...

As a poster child for the climate emergency, Miami Beach has become a world leader in mitigating the effects of sea-level rise. Now the subtropical Florida city is cutting back on its famous swaying palm trees as it seeks shadier alternatives to preserve its environment and try to keep residents and visitors cool. Officials have embarked on a 30-year plan to reduce the percentage of palm trees in the city to only one quarter of its total canopy by 2050... ...“Palms, while an iconic part of Miami Beach’s landscape, have moved from being an accent plant to a major component...

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling that had invalidated a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks. Environmentalists had claimed the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) had no authority to issue the permit because a 0.1-mile (530-foot) segment would cross 600 feet below the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail, which is administered by the National Park Service. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion scuttled that assertion.Pipeline project developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy should receive the...

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a finding that could – and certainly should – undermine some of the most outrageous lawsuits and jury awards in American history. Bolstered by San Francisco area juries that have given multi-multi-million-dollar awards to clients who claim glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller) caused their cancer, jackpot justice lawyers have recruited some 20,000 additional “corporate victims” who hope to reap their own fortunes.Their cases are based on the assertion that: (a) Bayer-Monsanto negligently or deliberately failed to warn consumers that the glyphosate it manufactures is carcinogenic; (b) the plaintiffs used Roundup...

The EU won't be able to lead by example if other countries can see what the Green Deal is actually headed toward: economic ruin, job loss, and more unwanted government intrusion. TimeÂ’s person of the year is a teenage activist famous for castigating adults across the world over their perceived inaction on climate change. Other activists tell us the world is burning down around us and weÂ’re doing nothing to stop it.Politicians and scientists are forcing policies on people and employers in moves to supposedly save the world without offering realistic, cost-effective, alternative energy sources. Of all the ills facing...

In 2017, America’s oil and gas industry spent $8.5 billion just on the steel pipe used in 11,300 wells to frack shale and drill conventional formations. That same steel would have cost $2 billion more, if these 25% tariffs had been in place, the AOPL explains. Similarly, a “typical” 280-mile pipeline would cost $75 million more, a “major” (Keystone XL) pipeline some $300 million more, under these tariffs.China has already slapped tariffs on US soybeans, and recently signaled that it can add to these oil patch woes bydirectly targeting shale country products, such as petrochemicals and liquefied propane. The Chinese...

One of the goals of Californians who traveled to Paris for climate talks this week was to showcase green-energy businesses that are succeeding in the state. But on Monday it was the “coercive power” of government for which Gov. Jerry Brown was seeking credit.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Tuesday staked out her opposition to Arctic oil exploration, a day after the Obama administration gave Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) final approval to drill off Alaska. "The Arctic is a unique treasure," Clinton said in a Twitter post. "Given what we know, it's not worth the risk of drilling." On Monday, the Obama administration gave Shell final approval to resume drilling into the oil zone off northern Alaska for the first time since 2012. Shell obtained the leases during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

California keeps reminding us what has gone astray with America in recent years. The state is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet it has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to the state's storage reserves — a critical project that was almost canceled by endless environmental lawsuits and protests. Although California has almost doubled in population since the dam's construction, its politicians apparently decided that completing more northern and Sierra Nevada water projects was passe. So the parched state now prays...

Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science. The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15. The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world. The red line is the 5-year running average temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the...

According to a top environmentalist organizer, climate change is responsible for this summer’s violence in Ferguson, Missouri. “To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive,” 350.org Strategic Partnership Coordinator Deirdre Smith wrote. “Oppression and extreme weather combine to ‘incite’ militarized violence,” she continued. Weeks of rioting followed the killing August 9 of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Observers around the nation criticized the police for a heavy-handed response to protests in the town, but while the rioting received international attention, it did not result in any loss of...

Although I have developed a strong tolerance for reading the worlds of the left-wing press through many years of exposure, Christopher Hayes article, “The New Abolitionism”, in The Nation made me almost sick with anger. Hayes’ article is notably noxious, attempting as it does to draw a parallel between the fossil fuel industry and slavery and arguing that efforts to destroy the fossil fuel industry amount to a “New Abolitionism” in that as the Abolitionists of old argued for the destruction of the wealth represented by the slaves held in the Antebellum South, today’s “New Abolitionists” now must argue for...

House Republicans are being accused of “environmental racism” by an environmental group that argues GOP efforts to reform decades-old chemical laws would disproportionately harm minority groups. At issue is draft legislation backed by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) that would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to focus on chemicals that pose the greatest risk to the public in enforcing environmental protections. Shimkus argues his bill would free up resources to focus on the most dangerous chemical threats, but the liberal Environmental Justice Health Alliance says it would end up hurting minority groups by moving resources away from policing the threats...

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT[A]) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT supports human extinction primarily because, in the group's view, it would prevent environmental degradation. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of man-made human suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources required by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has agreed to pay the parent company of the Ringling Bros. Circus $9.3 million to settle allegations that the animal group conspired to pay a witness for false testimony in a 12-year lawsuit over the treatment of circus elephants.

Fracking, the controversial method of extracting shale gas or other petroleum from deep below the earth's surface, might be possible in the Connecticut River Valley, geologists say. But the rock deposits likely to bear gas are thin here and difficult to access, making commercial exploitation of the resource unlikely in the near future. “It's not hard to hit,” said James L. Coleman Jr., a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “It's hard to do anything with once you get it.” Coleman was one of the speakers Thursday at a day-long conference on the future of shale gas, hydraulic fracturing...

Green agenda threatens economic futureWhen American voters re-elected President Obama, they also returned his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Interior and Energy departments and wide-ranging agenda for “fundamentally transforming” our nation. This will mean cementing Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, higher taxes and rampant spending. It also will bring more disputes over energy and environmental regulations, the vanguard of Mr. Obama’s determined campaign to eliminate hydrocarbons that power our economy and to embrace more “green” energy. The conflict will be fought primarily on six battlegrounds: Carbon taxes: Hurricane Sandy presented a fresh pretext for regulating and taxing hydrocarbons. No respectable climatologist or meteorologist believes...

Today is the Scottish National Party conference in Perth. At some stage, SNP leader Alex Salmond will no doubt be crowing, as he is wont to do, about his success in transforming Scotland into the "Saudi Arabia of renewables". This is inaccurate. What he has actually done is transform Scotland into the Saudi Arabia of tourism, which is to say he has turned a once-beautiful country into a vast, inhospitable desert which no one in their right mind would want to visit. Scotland's landscape was, until recently, one of the great glories of our national heritage. What made it so...

A pair of bald eagles is nesting on the San Francisco Peninsula for the first time in nearly a century, a milestone for the once-endangered symbol of strength and grandeur. The nest is tucked deep in a fir tree on the far edge of northern Crystal Springs Reservoir -- hard for humans to see, but with a bird's-eye view of 7.15 million noisy neighbors.

Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case. Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself. SNIP---- The Heartland Institute had already signaled...